Rant - haphazard and murky speech

The Politics of Address - page 3

The Term Rant
I propose the term “rant” to describe this complex of address, entreaty, and attack that characterizes the haphazard and murky speech that only sometimes gathers itself into a counterdiscourse and which has become a symptom of modernist writing, avowed to truth telling but unable to secure its own speech from the clutter of its own undoing.

against the humanist assumptions of sovereign speech that enable speaking truth to power, our concern in On Pain of Speech will be this notion of struggle that Foucault argues is immanent to power but takes the form of haphazard and murky speech at the margins of accepted intelligibility. Judith Butler reformulates the Foucauldian probléma- tique in terms of address and specifies the intersubjective event of a speech act “cluttered with signs of its own undoing.” this clamor of a speech addressed to another but undermined in its singular enun- ciation complicates the notion of autonomy that burdens our thinking of rebellion and revolt. Further, the notion that the speaking subject, the “i” of my speech, is itself a quasi-fictional creature whose speechs dependent upon the other of address flies in the face of that other fictional character, the sovereign speaker who defines my intelligibil- ity. the late Foucault, so devoted to a study of the technology of the self and the ways that subjection might afford us the means of its own undoing, was drawn to precisely this question of the complex inter- dependence of speaker and addressee insofar as his understanding of modern subjection passed through a prior notion of discourse, which he inherited from Georges Bataille, the philosopher of subjectivity and sovereignty who stooped to pornographic novels and ranting texts.6 

The ranter and the marginal 

Worse than marginal, ranters get no hearing and have fathered no legitimate legacy. 


The manifesto and the voice from below 

Such a failure to come into historical focus has been appropriated to a tradition of oppositional speech anchored in easily transmissible forms like the manifesto which then authorizes genre study of the voice from below; however, the “style” of ranting admits of no such legacy and leaves no heirs in form.